The short version of the story: the Washington Post planned to have dinners between reporters and lobbyists that the lobbyists would pay to attend, so they could talk to reporters. That's a little shady, but still more or less allowed. What's not cool is if those dinners were off-the-record, meaning that the public couldn't have knowledge of what lobbyists did or did not say to reporters who wrote about their jobs. The idea of the press and the people who push money around Washington to promote legislative causes getting together for expensive, secret pow-wows that would line the pocket of the Post is such a massive conflict-of-interest and ethics violation, it makes Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" tagline seem completely legit in comparison. The Post eventually woke up and canned the idea.

In July, Politico broke the story, and it resulted in the resignation of the Washington Post's marketing director, Charles Pelton, in September. What's great about being a sales and marketing exec at a newspaper is that they don't give a shit about ethics until somebody tells them "stop." In this case, that person should've been Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, whose reporters would be at these dinners. But Brauchli was cool with it. When the Times talked to Brauchli about the story in July, he claimed he thought the dinners would be on the record. When Pelton The Shady Marketing Director resigned over this in September, a bunch of lobbyists were like THAT SUCKS and Marcus Brauchli was like, I HAD NO IDEA HE WAS SHADY and issued a flat-out denial to the Times of any knowledge that the dinners were planned to be off the record.

Today, via The NYTpicker, the New York Times buried a note today in their corrections column:

...In a subsequent letter to (Charles) Pelton - which was sent to The Times by Mr. Pelton's lawyer - Mr. Brauchli now says that he did indeed know that the dinners were being promoted as "off the record," and that he and Mr. Pelton had discussed that issue.

Politico got the full letter between Pelton and Brauchli in which Brauchli claimed that he knew the records would be off the record, but not that kind of off the record. You know, the kind where we don't know who said what but we can still know who said it, which is a very specific kind of off the record called the "Chatham House Rule," which you've never heard of because you don't know bullshit journalism technicality lingo. You just know that "off the record" sure as shit sounds like "off the record," and that Brauchli claimed not to know the dinners were any kind of "off the record." Even Politico's Michael Caldrone, when he talked to Brauchli about it, got the same impression.

So, that happened. Brauchli-the executive editor of one of the largest newspapers in America-lied to the New York Times about how much he indeed knew about the ethical violations he and the Washington Post were in pursuit of before they killed the idea. But why'd the Times bury it in the corrections section? The NYTpicker contacted the Times for comment:

In an email to The NYTPicker, a NYT spokeswoman stands by the postscript. "The note speaks for itself," wrote Diane McNulty, the spokeswoman. "Information came to our attention after the Sept. 12 article and we decided that this note was warranted." McNulty did not elaborate.

Either the Times is embarassed they didn't dig deeper or needed to set the lines running for a larger report on how Brauchli's completely full of shit. Sadly, this is the kind of ethics violation Clark Hoyt would go to town on if he was allowed to write about anything else besides the New York Times. Also, sadly, this is how your newspaper sausage is made.

Well, to be fair, he said most of those terrible things about black people. Most of them! But not one of them. So Rick Sanchez has to apologize, to Rush, for assuming that because all the rest of the racist things were true that he didn't need to question this other one. "We have been unable to independently confirm that quote," Sanchez says, though he doesn't repeat the quote.

The fake quote is: "slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark." It comes from Wikipedia, which cites a book that got it from Wikipedia.

Also Limbaugh would've been maybe the third or fourth-most objectionable NFL owner, frankly, and owning the Rams would be more of a punishment than a fun investment. So, you know, who cared? Besides black players who didn't want to work for Limbaugh for obvious reasons. Those reasons being that all the other racist Limbaugh quotes weren't fabricated.

Stanley must be having the worst two weeks of her life. Hoyt — who's been on an absolute roll lately, taking on the mystical algorithms of the Weddings and Celebrations as well as the mysteries behind the Times' law-breaking, public-nuisance creating photographs — must've had something close to a coronary after seeing Stanley's now legendary Walter Cronkite appraisal, which was corrected not once, not twice, but three unbelievable times. Even Katie Couric laid into Stanley for utterly disgracing the memory of one of America's legendary news anchors at the Gray Lady. So Hoyt was next in line. And he gives Stanley's career an appraisal that basically amounts to something just short of "What the fuck were we all thinking?" in this week's public editor column, entitled How Did This Happen? Mr. Hoyt, the bamboo cane is yours:

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

To the bullet points! Other choice quotes:

• Sam Sifton - the Times culture editor - calling Stanley's appraisal a "a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash."
  
  
• Stanley's full-on mea culpa: "'This is my fault,' she said. 'There are no excuses.'"
  
  
• The secret rankings of fuckup NYT writers. Like Mediaite, but obviously way better: "Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year."
  
  
• The number of people specifically implicated by name in all of this: Lorne Manly, her editor. Copy editor Janet Higbie. Late-shift editor Nicole Herrington. Standards editor Craig Whitney. And Douglas Martin, who'd written the Cronkite obit before he died.
  
  
• Chip Cronkite — who'd actually warned the Times off of certain possibly-going-be-made errors before they were made — laughing it off: "Chip Cronkite seemed philosophical about all the errors. He said his parents had a joke ashtray with the inscription, 'Just give me the facts: I'll mix 'em up when I quote you.'"
  
  
• The public talk about Stanley's personal editor that she's been assigned, and now, has again. Back to those rankings: "For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued...Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention."
  
  
• Finally, the kicker: Clark Hoyt telling us how absolutely not-funny this is: "To The Times, this isn't a laughing matter. Whitney said: 'We cannot tolerate this, and have tightened procedures to rule out a recurrence. I have spoken with those involved, and other senior newsroom editors and I will monitor the implementation of these measures.'"

Actually, it's pretty hysterical: the top writers at the nation's most well-known newspaper need their own babysitters to make sure they don't fuck up the fact that Walter Cronkite did not, in fact, storm Omaha Beach. It's almost cute, like watching a one time all-star quarterback end up being spoon-fed baby food in a nursing home for The Olds while being reminded how Telstar is spelled correctly.

But not, because watching the inability of something to operate on its own is a fundamentally depressing experience.

How Did This Happen? [Clark Hoyt]

The NYT ran one, smaller correction of this story immediately after it ran on Saturday, but they come back today with the smackdown:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International. (Go to Article)

1. Since everybody knew Cronkite was on the way out, wouldn't Alessandra—or maybe an editor!—check this, in advance?

2. Maybe Alessandra is a closet Wikipedia fan, and that's why she makes so many mistakes? But then we checked and Wikipedia actually has the correct dates for those events, not the ones she used. Alessandra Stanley would actually benefit by checking her facts on Wikipedia.

[NYT]

In short, I follow TechCrunch on Twitter, so it does not show up in my list of suggested users. I did do some digging prior to my post to find out if everyone was presented with the same Suggested User List, and even confirmed with someone else that the user was not on that person's list, but obviously should have dug deeper in fact checking.

Original, now retracted story here:

Twitter's Suggested User List has been controversial lately, since it's tremendously valuable yet tremendously mysterious. Well, the microblogging startup just cleared up one thing: Cross Twitter, and you're off the list.

As of just yesterday, TechCrunch was on the so-called SUL, and founder Mike Arrington has blogged that the list position can generate 10,000 new signups a day. Fellow entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has even offered Twitter $250,000 for a slot.

TechCrunch is now off the list, one day after very controversially publishing internal Twitter documents it obtained from a computer hacker. Twitter originally said its list was determined by factors like whether an account has "fairly wide or mainstream appeal," but yesterday the startup hinted in a blog post that TechCrunch, whose appeal is well documented, might have made itself an exception:

...publishing these documents publicly could jeopardize relationships with Twitter's ongoing and potential partners.

There's no question that Arrington's ethics — and TechCrunch's integrity, by extension — were widely attacked outside of Twitter yesterday. Posts calling him "a very sad excuse for a man" and "SCUM" set the tone.

But by apparently wielding its star-making list as a weapon, Twitter just makes it a bigger point of discussion. Disaffected early adopters have been grumbling for months; one, blogging pioneer Dave Winer, predicted the Arrington situation back in March:

I do think the company should have done this much more carefully... And the people who got the push have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money... What if a reporter were critical of Twitter in a piece she wrote, would Twitter revoke her status?

For all its technical deficiencies, Twitter ended up scoring a PR victory from its hack attack, because it looked to many like the victim of an overeager publisher. Now it risks snatching defeat from the jaws of that victory, by looking like a bully. It's apparently a risk the company is willing to take; Arrington does have a remarkable talent for infuriating people like that.

According to the correct Andrea Rincon, "Clinton me ofreció dinero por sexo." We do not speak Spanish, but we are pretty sure we get the gist of that!

Apparently Rincon charged Bill $1,000 dollars (US) for the dance, and then came the offer of "dinero por sexo."

This is how Google translates the last bit of that story:

His performance lasted five minutes and included a shower on stage. However there was no total nudity.

We apologize for the error! Also: why is she wearing Matt Drudge's hat, and is that why he hasn't picked this story up?

[Pic via Perfil]

The first person to actually do this was, of course, Imus producer Bernard McGuirk. Even better, it was in the context of a hilarious routine involving a cardinal who speaks in a comical pretend Irish accent, which allows him to "get away" with saying "outrageous" things that "we're all thinking" but wouldn't say aloud because of the "PC police." And the segment began with that hilarious salsa music the Mexicans listen to, in their cars.

We apologize for the error. In the future, when we suspect someone has been the first to make a racially tone-deaf joke about a prominent minority figure, we will make sure to check the Imus archives before reporting it.

Saylor was keen to point out he has lost about 30 pounds in recent years. We used the most recent picture available on Getty Images, shot at a June 2005 party for Capitol File Magazine. Saylor, a longtime bachelor and almost-as-longtime careful-groomer of his media image, helpfully sent along a more svelte shot, included in the before/after spread above.

Saylor also notes he does not own a Gulfstream G4, the vehicle Six had him taking to Cannes. That makes sense: he fell off Forbes' billionaire's list in 2001, after losing a record $6 billion in one day, and has yet to return, so a plane priced at around $15 million would probably be too rich for his blood. (Although his data-mining software company seems to be awaiting delivery of several planes; it has reserved three registration numbers with the FAA.)

Saylor's full correction follows below. Given his reported penchant for nine-hour indoctrination sermons, we applaud its efficient brevity and are less frightened of future communication.

And here's Saylor in full-length slender glory, just to show we appreciate his new look:

Selena Roberts just wrote the big scandalous book about A-Rod (and the NYT was scooped on its contents, btw). One of her accusations in the book: that, during blowout games, A-Rod used to tip batters on the opposing team to what pitches were on the way, if they would do the same for him.

So last Sunday, the NYT examined A-Rod's stats in a "Keeping Score" column, and found that there was no statistical evidence to back up the allegation (better hitting by A-Rod or the opposing middle infielders late in blowout games, for example). The headline: "Numbers Indicate Rodriguez Didn't Tip Pitches With Rangers."

Which pissed off Selena Roberts, we hear! Her reps contacted the NYT, complaining that the story's writer never contacted her, and, more importantly, that the story's headline wasn't supported by its facts because her book claims that A-Rod was cheating with a select group of buddies, not every opposing middle infielder in baseball.

We hear that the Times acknowledged that the headline was erroneous, but internal debate about whether to run an editor's note—a debate which went all the way up to Bill Keller—took so long that the correction to the story was just added yesterday.

Here it is:

A headline for the Keeping Score column on Sunday, about an analysis of the assertion in a new book that Alex Rodriguez revealed pitches to opposing middle infielders to let them know what was coming with the expectation that they would return the favor, referred incorrectly to the findings. As the column reported, the numbers show that either no so-called tipping of pitches occurred or that it was ineffective; the numbers did not "indicate" that "Rodriguez didn't tip pitches."

But Roberts is still pissed that nothing in the story was changed. Says one of the people who are working with her: "First The Times was beaten by its former reporter with the bombshell story that A-Rod used steroids. Then The Times gets the story about A-Rod cheating during games all wrong. But Bill Keller is too worried about losing readers and losing money to risk losing faith among readers by running an appropriate editor's note or full correction."

That seems a bit overblown. (We've contacted the paper for comment and we'll let you know what we hear. UPDATE: See their response below.) The original headline may have been a stretch, but stats are stats. A-Rod could have gotten tipped off for pitches and still not hit better. He could have done it so infrequently that it didn't show up in his stats. You can both be right! Let's all come together to condemn this rich baseball player as one.

[NYT story with correction here. Selena Roberts also addresses this in a Deadspin podcast today.]

UPDATE: NYT spokesperson Diane McNulty sends us this response:

The article did not take issue with Selena Roberts's assertions about A-Rod. It said that the effects that any tipped pitches would normally be expected to produce did not show up in statistics, which indicated that "either no tipping was going on or it was pathetically ineffective." The headline on the article went beyond that and so we promptly (on Monday for Tuesday's paper, typical for errors in Sunday editions) corrected it. There was no internal debate at all about whether to run an editors' note.

indieWire and the other outlets that picked up the story misconstrued the timeline of the events, making it sound like Nathan Lee, the film critic whose review was censored, didn't know about the alterations before the story went up. That is not true: he knew NPR would only run a bastardized, censored version of his review, without the names "Larry Craig" and "Charlie Crist," when they informed him of this fact a day after the piece was supposed to go up. At which point Lee asked that his byline be removed and a disclaimer attached.

That seems like a relatively unimportant detail, considering that the larger point—that NPR is proving the film's argument that media outlets are complicit in the hypocrisy of closeted conservatives—but it was apparently worth it to NPR's management to keep this story alive, so the record has been corrected.

And this is still the record: despite plenty of speculation on the sexuality of random pop culture figures, NPR refuses to mention that Larry Craig—who was arrested for soliciting sex from a man in a public restroom—might be gay, in the context of a review of a film about how media outlets refuse to mention that lots of people who legislate against homosexual rights are secretly gay, themselves.

Here is some material from the film Outrage, about how those repressed closeted gay Republicans are totally great at immoral filthy gay homosex.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly included entrepreneur Stephen Bing as a participant to testify before a grand jury.

Someone's lawyers called a certain major newspaper! Bing is always quick to 'correct' unflattering stories about him in the press.

So let it be known: scuzzy rich real estate heir, developer, and major Democratic party fundraiser Steve Bing will not testify to the grand jury about how he hired criminal wiretapping private eye Anthony Pellicano for some sort of matter related to his messy paternity case with Elizabeth Hurley while Pellicano was secretly actually working for billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who was paying Pellicano to figure out that Kerkorian's ex-wife's daughter was actually fathered by Bing. For the record!

A New York Times correction coming this weekend about an article from last December about a "vending machine for crows" in the Binghamton zoo says in part: "The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo...Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein's machine is unlikely to work as intended." That's pretty bad.


The Newseum in DC had 714,000 paid visitors in its first year. That makes it just as popular as the Washington Post.


Toothless magazine group ASME is criticizing ESPN mag and EW for putting ads on their front covers. Here's what we imagine the mags' response is: "Give me one million dollars and then I won't do it."


A Fox employee has reportedly been arrested for stealing the personal information of other Fox employees. Actual quote from an internal Fox email: "The investigation suggests that the confidential data was used to annoy selected individuals." HAHAHAHA. ['Fox is annoying regardless joke']

[Newseum pic via Sonofgroucho]

Rupert Everett, a VF contributing editor, told the Daily Beast Monday how he'd once stayed in a hotel room directly under Carter's, and heard him elicit "the purest sounds of pleasure I'd ever heard" from some woman, with what Everett presumed was his "monster cock."

Page Six went right to the purported horse's mouth for a reaction, and heard back from a VF flack:

Graydon's still trying to figure out who was using his room.

Unfortunately, there's no retracting the image Everett had lodged in our skulls.

But the paper issued a correction:

So that fixes that right up.

Do expect more of this sort of thing. Your partners at Sheehan, Schiavoni, Jutras and Magliocchetti, LLP will be thrilled.

The Times ran this correction today:

An article on Jan. 28 about women who commiserated over dating Wall Street bankers caught in the financial crisis described a group they had formed, Dating a Banker Anonymous, as a support group. That is the name of their blog. Its creators originally told The Times that about 30 women had participated, but since publication, they have said that all involved were friends. Laney Crowell, one of the women who started the blog, said in the article that it was "very tongue in cheek;" she has since described it as a satire that embellishes true experiences for effect. Had the nature of the blog been made clear at the outset, the article would have described it accordingly, not as a support group.

Okay fine, so they were exaggerating on their blog for effect and they lied about the whole "support group" thing.

But guess what: they still went out looking for fame, spawned worldwide media knockoffs, and—most importantly—actually are living, breathing, sashaying symbols of the deadly effects that the financial boom had on sex and love in America.

So yea, maybe the Times should have been more skeptical. But no takebacks, ladies; that DABA girl mentality is way too real. [via Business Insider]

UPDATE: The origin of the NYT correction was apparently this Newsweek story yesterday. It doesn't make the DABA girls sound much better, though.

Sorgatz's comments to the Observer seemed to many an open bid to ratchet up his microcelebrity at the expense of accuracy and good taste. Some of the budding media mogul's critics will surely say his more recent comments are designed to keep the controversy.

Perhaps that's unfair: Sorgatz issued a clear and early apology to Rachel Sklar, the former Huffington Post writer who he dated for six months and then referred to in the Observer as "an exit strategy" to his tendency to date younger women.

I’m really sorry about how Rachel came across in that story. Most of you know her, so it doesn’t need to be said that she’s awesome. She’s taught me more about media and New York and maybe myself than anyone in my life. I appreciate her so much more than the story lets on, and I’m so sorry any of this happened like this.

There are also clear admissions in Sorgatz's most recent post on the matter. He admits he did not "technically" found the High Plains Reader, as he apparently told the Observer. "I tend to say I was there at the beginning because I actually was working with them from the start, waiting for my days at the student paper to end," he wrote.

Um, sure, but did you get $100,000 when the paper sold? Seems unlikely: there were four founders, two active at the paper when it sold for $150,000.

Sorgatz also confirms he had ownership of Web Guide, despite using the title of editor. Did he "start" the magazine, as the Observer reported? Not clear.

Sorgatz says he did in fact own a condo in Minneapolis, despite that one anonymous former (self-described) roomate who said otherwise.

One thing Sorgatz doesn't have to take any flack for: The erroneous assertion that he bought Wii game consoles for his nephews, when in fact he has only nieces. The Observer's Sencer Morgan has taken the fall for that error, telling us, "I regret that I mixed up nieces and nephews, it's always been an issue for me."

(Photo via Sorgatz's Flickr stream.)